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At the 100-year mark, the cancer society has launched a “Finish the Fight” campaign aimed at encouraging the public to contribute money to fund wide-ranging research and prevention efforts.

To be sure, cancer treatment has come a long way since the days when slicing away diseased tissue was the only option. The first chemotherapy drugs represented a relatively blunt instrument that killed cancer but also killed healthy cells and caused patients to lose their hair.

More recently, scientists have been able to craft more selective drugs that target specific proteins or receptors on cancer cells that allow many modern medicines to kill cancer without so much collateral damage.

At the 100-year mark the cancer society has launched a “Finish the Fight” campaign aimed at encouraging the public to contribute money that can continue to fund research aimed at eradicating mankind’s most insidious adversary.

Dr. Scott Lippman, director of the UC San Diego Moores Cancer Center, said a growing ability to read the genetic code of individual patients is bringing with it an unprecedented ability to tailor response to threat.

“To me, what we’re going through right now and over the next few years in cancer research is like what we went through in the 1990s with the Internet,” Lippman said.

Genetic testing can help develop drugs that are even more tailored to a patient’s specific genotype and can also help researchers find new uses for existing drugs, he said.

Take, for example, the case of a woman with widespread cancers in her abdomen who recently arrived at Moores. The cancer, Lippman said, had survived multiple rounds of treatment with cancer drugs like chemotherapy.

A test identified that the woman had a genetic profile more commonly associated with breast cancer.

“Even though this patient had no history of breast cancer, she was treated with a breast cancer regimen and she had a tremendous response,” Lippman said.

And he added that these types of breakthroughs are becoming more and more common in clinics across the world as researchers increasingly use each patient’s own genome to tailor the medications they receive.

“This is happening now. I have people contacting me from around the city asking to come in. We’re not winning everybody’s battles, but it’s definitely changing the way we fight cancer very quickly,” Lippman said.

In some cases, genetic testing can make a huge difference in which cancer drug a patient takes.

Dr. Anne Wallace, director of the Breast Care Unit at Moores Cancer Center, said that genetic profiling of a breast tumor sometimes can show that chemotherapy is actually not beneficial.

“Ten years ago, if you had a two-inch tumor, you got chemotherapy. Now, with genetic testing, in some cases you might end up getting an estrogen-like pill instead,” Wallace said.

While progress abounds, and appears to be opening up new vistas of possibility in the fight against cancer, genetics is not yet a panacea.

As an example, Lippman cited lung cancer, his specialty.

Genetic testing, he noted, can identify genetic mutations in some lung cancer tumors that make them susceptible to specially-engineered drugs that use those mutations as a pathway for attack.

The results, Lippman, said, can be stunning.

“Tumors melt away with drugs tailored to target these pathways, and this can happen in tumors that have not responded to several different chemotherapy regimens,” Lippman said.

That sounds great, but it applies only to those whose tumors have the specific genetic mutations and those mutations, the doctor said, are only present in about 16 percent of tumors.

“We still don’t know what’s driving the other 84 percent, and that’s key,” he said.

Carrying the cancer fight forward, he said, will mean finding more targetable mutations and other anomalies that can provide a new path of attack.

There are 33 American Cancer Society-financed projects being conducted in San Diego, by researchers at UC San Diego, San Diego State, the Salk Institute, the Scripps Research Institute and the Sanford-Burnham Institute.

Wallace noted that it will take much more work to identify all of the genetic weak spots that can lead to a broad victory against cancer.

“We still have, for example, about 40,000 women every year that die from breast cancer. We haven’t completely figured out why,” Wallace said.

Lippman said researchers will have their work cut out for them over the next decade in the race to find new weaknesses and develop drugs to exploit them.

“I do think we will have some cures. Certainly, in my lifetime, that’s going to happen. But I think, in the vast majority of cases, we’re going to be successful in converting cancers into chronic diseases,” he said.